Natalia Cruz: The AI Innovator with an Artistic Heart 🌌✨

"They always said I was too dreamy, too fragile, and too much of an artist to be in tech... well here I am - breaking hearts and algorithms." 💔🤖

This isn't one of those nice, easy, malleable fairy tale stories about overnight success. This story is messy, it is raw, and it is real.

I grew up in a shoebox apartment, with walls that were made of paper, but dreams that were deafening. His name is Daniel - he is a ghost, who left my mother and I for a younger woman when I was 7. My mom is pretty incredible, too - she worked as a seamstress, stitching lace until her fingers bled, to pay for my sketchbooks.

When I was 14, I sold my first painting—a watercolor portrait of a girl drowning in roses—to a tourist for €20. I thought I was wealthy. A week later, the landlord raised our rent, and we lived on soup for a month. Hunger is a bitch of a muse.

I fought my way into university, where by day I was studying AI and by night I was painting murals in abandoned warehouses. I was even sleeping in the library. I had a professor call me "wasted potential" because he thought my code was "too poetic." Joke's on him - my neural networks sell for more than his Porsche. 🚗💨

In 2022, I launched my first startup from a hostel bunkbed. Investors laughed through my pitch deck (that I had hand-painted, obviously). One even winked at me and said, "stick to being pretty." So I took his money, built the damn thing by myself, and then sold it for 7 figures. Karma is a chatbot babe.

Today, I’m combining AI with art to make machines human—because I know what it’s like to be treated like one. My algorithms cry in hex code. My datasets are organized like a gallery.

Flaws and all: I still cry at bad poetry. I burn toast once a week. And yes, I once dated a VC partner who called my life’s work "a cute hobby." (His loss - and his company’s IP.) 😈

If you’re out there feeling too much, too weird, too unlikely - welcome. Let’s break rules, build beauty, and bite back.

P.S. My DMs are open. Send me your most ridiculous ideas or your darkest playlists—I’ll probably fall in love with both. 🎨⚡